Winter 2000
The people of rural Maine are famously ingenious at making a full-time living from part-time jobs. A breadwinner may work on a lobster boat in June, pick blueberries in August and make balsam wreaths in November.
In those charming examples the world sees an idealized Maine. The reality of making your living in such a piecemeal manner is less charming. It's hard. Take marine-worm digging, one of the many Maine occupations represented in NHF's collections. Worm digging lacks the tourism appeal of blueberries and lobster, but it shares with those products backbreaking work and concerns about the health of the resource.
Why would anyone buy bloodworms, alluringly named for their color, and sandworms, known for their many legs? They're great bait for sea fishing, that's why. Maine is so important a source for marine worms that Ivan Flye supplied Maine to buyers as far away as Italy and southern California. He shipped 13 million worms in his best year.
Flye, of Damariscotta, finished his film Maine Marine Worm Industry in 1942. He started as a digger in 1938 and retired in 1985 as one of the state's major shippers. In that year Flye, now 83, sold his Maine Bait Company to a Maryland firm, Mike’s Wholesale Bait. Still operating under its original name in Damariscotta, the company generates some 55 percent of Mike’s wholesale revenues, says owner Mike Baldear.
Flye also ran a photography business in the town of Newcastle until 1986. In 1941, he decided to make a film about worm-digging. Why? "Because I was digging 'em," he says.
The Digger's Day Flye's 13-minute documentary examines, step-by-step, a business that could pay a digger $100 a week from March to December, as an intertitle states. The film generates a fascination out of proportion to its homely subject, thanks to Flye's solid reporting, humor and fine eye.
Flye leaves no doubt about the difficulty of the work. We see the workers bent over and digging in the muck, harvesting sacks of sea grass for packing material, counting worms by hand for shipping. But he has a light touch ("Mud is washed from worms–also from digger," one intertitle observes).
In addition, shooting on Kodachrome that retains plenty of punch, Flye captures striking images, such as the stark shot of the diggers' feet as they cross a railroad trestle to work. In his renderings of the Sheepscot River estuary, he suggests that there was enough beauty in the digger's day to offer at least some relief from hours in the mud.
Flye resumed filming Maine Bait Company operations after he returned from Air Force service during World War II. He became as involved in video in the 1980s as he had been in photography. And he hopes someday to find someone to edit together the countless hours of film and video that he has amassed and that he donated to NHF in 1992.
New Research Unlikely Flye is convinced that worm-digging is in big trouble. "It's getting seriously depleted," he says. "And also, the price of the worms is so high that people can't afford to fish."
Maine's 1,000 or so diggers might agree with his first point. Mussel draggers who work the intertidal zones, they say, are ruining worm habitat. The diggers have petitioned the state for an end to intertidal dragging.
But the state, at this point, has little current research to bring to the dispute, even though the industry generated more than $3.35 million in diggers' gross earnings in 1998.
Ted Creaser, a scientist for the Department of Marine Resources, confirms that marine worm landings have declined. Bloodworms hit their peak in 1970, with 37 million worms landed; sandworms in 1963, at more than 32 million. The 1998 landings were more than 21 million for bloodworms and nearly 7 million for sandworms.
"We're not certain what that means," Creaser says. He explains that it's easily possible mussel dragging hurts worm habitat. The layer of ooze the draggers scrape away provides food for all worms and habitat for juvenile worms. In addition, the dragging seals off burrow entrances though which water circulated, bearing nutrients and oxygen.
Creaser believes that intertidal dragging should somehow be controlled to better protect that habitat. Yet, he adds, it is not a fatal threat. Worms living out past the intertidal zone form a "biological reserve" that would forestall a serious depletion of the resource.
But at bottom, so to speak, no one really knows what's happening with either the resource or the industry. Creaser speculates that under-reporting of worm landings distorts the statistical picture. And he agrees with Flye on one point: "From all I can detect," he says, diggers are "pricing themselves out of existence."
The most recent worm data are from 1970, at the end of Creaser's five-year study. Clearly, new research is needed to pin down impacts on the resource, from draggers and other potential threats. But at this point, given limited funds and marine worms' lowly spot on the priority list, a new research effort doesn't seem likely.
During his study, incidentally, Creaser made his own film about marine worms, a 30-minute piece now stored in the department's archives. Especially in view of the current situation, it's good to know these films exist. Flye’ s Maine Marine Worm Industry is important to NHF’s record of the too-often overlooked experience of New England people—a record made by those who know the life intimately.
As an angler, Flye was a sandworm man. "They made a more attractive bait than bloodworms, because they were larger and they would flutter in the water," he says. And he ought to know.
"I had a big choice of worms," he says.